On old passenger ships, the part of the ship where the poorest passengers travelled — the ones with the cheapest tickets. It was down low, near the bottom of the ship, crowded, with no private cabins and little air or light. The word belongs above all to the great period of emigration, roughly the 1840s to the 1920s, when millions of people crossed the Atlantic to America in steerage. So today it is a history word: you meet it in books, films and museum captions about immigrants, and 'they came over in steerage' is a way of saying a family arrived poor. People sometimes borrow it as a joke about the cheapest seats on a plane — 'I'm flying steerage' means economy at the back. There is also an older, technical meaning: on a sailing ship, steerage was the space near the steering gear at the back, which is where the name comes from — that cheap accommodation happened to be down there. Modern ships do not have steerage; the class system on ships ended long ago.

（舊時客輪的）統艙、最便宜的下等艙。講移民史時常譯「統艙」；開玩笑指飛機經濟艙時，中文會說「坐在最後面」